Was watching Eureka (Its a TV show, about this town with brilliant scientists) and they had an episode a little while ago where an organic computer got infected with a virus and got transmitted to a person when they used it.
This made me think, this can really happen once organic computers start becoming commonplace. After all human beings are pretty much an organic computer with a pretty face. So it would become possible to send an email attachment to a target group (lets say an enemy country) and infect their bio-computers. Then the virus would copy itself over to the human operator and set itself up as a background process in the human mind (There is more than enough processing power in the human brain for this) and once its set up it could monitor all actions/thoughts etc and keep a log of everything that person does, this data would then be sent back to the creator of the worm/virus to be used as seen fit by them.
The virus could even take over the human and make them do stuff that they wouldn’t normally do (like treason, or espionage) and I don’t think there is an easy way we could detect something like this and prevent it from happening. It reminds me of a novel I read a couple of years ago where humans had chips implanted in their heads to allow them to process/store data and one of the character’s chip got hijacked and they could no longer control their actions. Now the same thing will be possible without any extra hardware implanted in the target.
I guess to counteract this we would have to have an anti-virus program for the human mind: “Scan your brain for virus’s and trojans today”. Before any secret meetings all participents would have to have their brains scanned.
To make things scarier governments could release a worm that let them keep an eye on their subjects and stop any activity they don’t like before it got far. Think “Big Brother” in your head…
think scared doesn’t it?